👋 Hello

I am a lead data scientist at the FD Mediagroep, where I lead a team of four data scientists on the award winning BNR SMART Radio, and FD’s SMART Journalism projects. I obtained my PhD in Information Retrieval at ILPS (at the University of Amsterdam) in 2017 under supervision of prof. dr. Maarten de Rijke.

For it, we had a long (90+ min) lecture combining insights, experiences, and projects from our work at RTL, Blendle (Daan), and FD Mediagroep (me). In addition, we did a small hands-on workshop, implementing a content-based re-ranker for WikiNews. See our slides and notebooks here: https://github.com/graus/recsys_summer_school/

Yesterday BNR SMART Radio won two Dutch Interactive Awards (DIA 2019) Awards! We were nominated together with Elastique, the folks who designed the UX/interface of our BNR SMART Radio app which you can download here (or in your app stores, both Android/iOS)!

🥇 Content

We won Gold in the category “Content”. Why, you may ask?

“Finally a reason to listen to Radio in general, and BNR in particular. Because advertising is absent and topics are tailored to the personal taste of the listener, who can search in a targeted way and express appreciation for a broadcast through a thumbsup, they reach new target audiences online.”

🥈 Disruptor

Next to this, we also won the Silver DIA2019 Award in the category “Disruptor”!

“In a world where radio has never deviated from the linear model, the jury finds this very disruptive. SMART Radio provides a personal radio experience and possibly a new revenue model in the long term. The jury members find the potential of the underlying strategy even more impressive. What if BNR joins forces with FD Mediagroep and combines the work of both parties in this? The jury sees all kinds of opportunities to fit in new forms of advertising (or to omit them). The collaboration between the agency and the media company has resulted in something that has never been seen before.”

In the context of the upcoming workshop “AI and Journalism” Bennie Mols interviewed me for the website of the European Science-Media Hub, on how we apply AI in journalism for Het FD and BNR. Read the piece here:

After winning the Marconi award for radio innovation, yesterday we picked up the AMMA Award for Media Innovation for our news personalization efforts at FD Mediagroep (both SMART Journalism for Het FD and SMART Radio for BNR Nieuwsradio)!

It’s really great to see that our current investment into AI and innovation seems to resonate with the outside world 🤖. And I am really happy to be with a company that sees this development as such an important direction that we are able to work with a big and talented team of data scientists, interns, engineers, and product folks 🤓

In response to my op-ed in Het Parool, Jim Stolze interviewed me and published the interview on the website of De Nationale AI Cursus (a free online course/MOOC on AI aimed at the general public); Read the article below:

I wrote a response on recent coverage around the alleged ‘promotion’ of anti-vax books by bol.com, suggesting it is due to “influential, steering, algorithms.” In this piece I state it’s not an issue of algorithms, but of long-tail, obscure, content. My response was published in Het Parool, as an edited letter. Read the original, unedited piece (in Dutch) below.

Together with Anne Schuth and Daan Odijk I’ll be co-organizing The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval workshop (DIR 2019). At DIR 2018, we sat down during lunch and came up with the following plan:

#DIR2019 will try something new. Top ranked IR papers from WWW, WSDM, CIKM, NeurIPS, RecSys, CHI, CHIIR, KDD, ECIR, ACL, EMNLP (in no particular order, open to suggestions) with authors in NL & BE will be invited to present their work in a lightning talk⚡#DIR2018